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Leading for the Future

What is this?

Leading for the Future is a resource created with children, young people and adults from across Woodcraft Folk to support local groups to explore and develop their understanding of leadership, learn new skills and grow in confidence as young leaders. It is a set of activities, exploring different aspects of leadership, developing new skills and putting them into practice.

We talked to lots of young people about their involvement in Woodcraft Folk and how that’s grown and developed. Their stories have informed and inspired this programme.

How do we use these activities?

The Leading for the Future resource pack contains a series of activities, organised into a number of sessions, which could be run at regular group night meetings. You don’t have to run all the sessions week-after-week – you could break up the programme and do one a month, or a little bit each term over a year. Decide what would suit your group best. If you wanted to do the whole thing in one go, you could even go away for a weekend as a group and work through the programme together at a hostel or camp. You can adapt activities to suit your group, or pick the ones of most use to you, but remember that they are designed to follow on from each other over the course of the programme, so make sure you don’t skip something that you’d come back to later on.

Where did this come from?

Ever wanted to take a more active role in leading Woodcraft Folk activities, but not sure where to start?

Interested in supporting other groups in your district, but feel you don’t have enough experience?

Inspired by projects and campaigns around you led by other young people? Want to find out more about how to get involved?

Does your district need more volunteers to keep on running its groups?

Do DFs and young Kinsfolk from your district tend to disappear rather than becoming young leaders?

We listened to lots of young people about their involvement in Woodcraft Folk and how they would like that to develop. Together with the group leaders who are keen to find need new volunteers and young Kinsfolk who want to find new places for themselves in the movement, their views and experiences guided the development of this programme. Leading for the Future helps prepare Venturers and DFs to get more involved in supporting Woodcraft groups, as well as taking action on their values and concerns.

We developed this resource as a team of young people, adult leaders, staff and experts in youth participation and youth leadership. We got contributions, input and ideas from others and built a set of activities together. You can browse the archive of this project at wcfleaders.posterous.com and find out about how we got here.